Mailchannels kicks spam-fighting into overdrive

Mailchannels, a Vancouver-based company that makes spam filters, just announced an upgrade to their Traffic Control email security program that they say substantially increase both capacity and performance.

By using traffic-shaping technology placed atop a high-performance web server platform, Traffic Control is able to pre-filter spam before it arrives at an organization’s mail server. The end result, according to Mailchannels, is to reduce server costs by up to 95 per cent.

The rationale is simple: less spam traffic means less hardware required for our customers – saving them millions of dollars annually. In the past, increasing spam volume meant adding costly new hardware,” said Ken Simpson, CEO at MailChannels. “Nginx was a logical foundation because of its lightning speed and very low memory footprint.”

Traffic Control works by separating senders into three distinct categories: bad senders are blocked, good senders are expedited for delivery, and new, unknown senders are restricted in bandwidth down to a few bytes per second. This traffic shaping forces 99.6% of spammers to drop off, without negatively affecting legitimate senders.

It remains to be seen if Mailchannel’s technology will be bought up or outdone by a bigger rival, but at the moment the company seems to have upped the ante against spammers, and if users can agree on anything, it’s that no-one wants yet another email touting the medicinal powers of “v8agra”.

Warren Frey

Warren Frey is a writer, editor, blogger and podcaster based out of Vancouver, BC. After working for six years in the Canadian broadcasting industry, he switched to print and has since covered varied assignments from plumbing conferences to star-studded film galas. But he’s never lost his love for the internet and interactive media, from his teens when he dived into the WELL on his “Woz”...
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